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Herman Cain's Racial Balancing Act
Left for dead a few weeks ago, Herman Cain’s long-shot presidential campaign was resurrected by a surprising win in the Florida straw poll, upsetting front-runners Rick Perry and Mitt Romney in the process. In a CNN interview, Cain found his swagger and proclaimed, “African Americans have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering…
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Sarah Palin: Graceless Under Pressure
Sarah Palin finally made a public statement about the Arizona shootings this week and the criticism directed at her role in creating an atmosphere of incivility and outright hostility in the American political discourse. It wasn’t her finest moment. She included an obscure anti-Semitic reference to “blood libel” in her meandering, nearly eight-minute video. “Vigorous…
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A Hate Crime? Never Mind
When is a hate crime not a hate crime? When there’s no perpetrator and no victim. Bethany Storro was white and pretty. Her alleged assailant was black and dangerous. Who goes around with a cup of acid and throws it in the face of pretty white girls? Apparently, someone with a severe mental disorder. As…
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McGruder's Take on Perry Draws Blood
For a while now I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks. I loved The Boondocks as a newspaper comic strip and raised hell trying to get my local “fish wrap” to carry it. I’ve found The Boondocks cartoon on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim lineup to be occasionally funny and other times…
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Police Brutality or Civilian Stupidity?
By now if you haven’t seen the video of the Seattle police officer cold-cocking a 17-year-old black girl, you might want to check your Internet connection. There were certainly enough cameras capturing every moment when police officer Ian P. Walsh attempted to arrest Marilyn Ellen Levias for jaywalking. Things went from the mundane to the…
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Pam Grier: From Sex Symbol to Cult Figure
If you’re old enough to remember when Pam Grier was blowing away dirtbags while struggling to remain fully clothed (she was successful sometimes and sometimes she wasn’t), you’ll remember she was the original bad mama who didn’t take no mess. She was first—if not the only—black female action hero. Oh, and she was sexy as…
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Is Your Mother a Prostitute?
Forget about the calls to boycott Arizona for its ridiculous “racial profiling is cool” anti-immigration law. If black folks need our own agenda, boycotting the Miami Dolphins should rank high on our to-do list. Maybe you heard by now that Dez Bryant, a wide receiver from Oklahoma State and the first-round pick of the Dallas Cowboys in…
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The Audacity of Erykah Badu
Because by this time next week the world will have moved on from the Erykah Badu controversy, let me say a little sumthin’ sumthin’ about Ms. Badu’s striptease in Dealey Plaza, where John F. Kennedy bought it 47 years ago. Let me make it clear from the jump. I am not a prude, puritan or…
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Can Black Journalists Be Trusted to Cover Obama?
When a weary and jet-lagged Barack Obama took the stage on the last day of the UNITY Journalists of Color convention in Chicago last month, most of the attendees had already left. But there was still a healthy crowd of over 2,500 there to hear the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. That is when, according to…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
